I’m not the only one, it seems, who has caught a morning driving toward a Great Lake where the clouds arc high above the horizon in the morning light. All the low-angle sunlight, breaking behind the cloud bank offers a visually stunning feat. Driving toward the water, you see mountains behind.

Those mornings, driving along Lake Superior, cresting a hill to witness this, those mornings were damn fine. I’m a child of flat horizons and I know the comfort of Superior and the hills of the North Shore. The distant flats where Superior’s waters meet the sky bring a peace to my mind like few other landscapes can. Still, when the sky, the sun, and the clouds conspire to add mountains to the horizon, to crest my lake with a visage of ancient rock? I can’t think of a better magic trick.

In talking with a friend the other day who calls Chicago home, it turns out that Lake Michigan knows the trick too.

With a little luck, when the sun finally slips above our Antarctic flats, we’ll see mountains here too.